NYT Article on Origins of Baseball

[Fred Shapiro]

I don't want to wax Barry-esque, but there's a huge front-page article in
the N.Y. Times today about the origins of baseball.  To make a long story
short, the basic fact about the origins of baseball, which has been
well-known for many decades, is that it is mentioned and pictured in an
English children's book first published in 1744 (although there are no
surviving editions before 1760).  Yet the Times article, in 40 paragraphs,
alludes to this basic fact in only one of them, and even there only
mentions that David Block knows of seven 18th-century English references
to baseball, giving no details.  Block, who is the leading authority on
early baseball, is described as if he is just making a claim about the
existence of these references, one of many people with different theories.

This is like someone writing a 40-paragraph article on the origins of
"O.K." without even mentioning "oll korrect."

Fred Shapiro


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